I stood, shakily, and packed the bag that Rosalie had given me. I walked out the front door. I kept walking all the way down the driveway. When I reached the road, I looked over my shoulder. From a distance, our little cottage was a solitary light in a sea of black, a home at the edge of the world.
If I left, how would Amir ever find me?
The sea was invisible in the night, but I could hear it still. I could not imagine a life without this sound, its murmur and its roar, its perpetual reminder of everything I feared and everything I loved.
I turned onto the road and kept walking. Eventually a truck approached and I hitched a ride into town. I used the phone in the café to call the number Rosalie had given me. When she picked up, I felt a rush of relief at the sound of her voice.
“Please help me,” I said.
RONNIE WAS THEonly true friend that I made in college. She was more than enough. We became roommates and, with Ronnie leading the way, I began to embrace San Francisco, exploring its neighborhoods, trying cuisines from around the world at new restaurants, dancing on sticky floors to live bands, and huddling together, laughing, on overcrowded buses that sped too quickly over the city’s steep hills. At night, the sky was a dull gray haze pierced by the lights of office buildings. After many months of anxiously wondering when Bear would follow through on his threat to tell someone that Amir and I had played a role in Rei’s death, I slowly began to allow myself to enjoy my new life.
Ronnie and I studied together, we went to coffee shops and art museums and movies, and even—rarely, but sometimes—went on double dates. To her exasperation, I could never bring myself to go on more than one date with the same boy. Each boy, however different from Amir, would reveal some small traitthat made me think of him. One held his fork tightly as though it might jump from his hand. Another widened his eyes when he listened to me. A fellow English major’s living room contained neat piles of hardcover novels, and I could think only of the stones that Amir had always managed to stack so high on the beach.
“Whoever he was,” Ronnie announced one morning after I’d described another miserable date, “you need to forget him.”
“Who?”
“The guy who broke your heart.”
I was surprised, but of course she was right. Amirhadbroken my heart. I could not believe that he had left me, that he had disappeared without a word. Most of the time, I could not bring myself to believe that he’d had anything to do with Rei’s death. But there were nights when I lay awake and thought of the indented pillow I’d seen beside Rei. The look of terror on her face. The empty box on the floor. The many years of violence and humiliation that Amir had experienced at the hands of Bear.
What frightened me perhaps most of all was that in those moments when I forced myself to consider what Amir might have done to Rei, I loved him anyway.
RONNIE VOLUNTEERED WITHLearning Together, a nonprofit organization that offered a free after-school enrichment program for elementary school children. Many of the children lived in low-income housing, and some lived in shelters. I joined Ronnie one afternoon and was assigned to help two second-gradegirls with their homework. One of the girls, Keira, was amiable and talkative. The other, Marty, did not say a word to me. She pushed out her lips and glared at me each time I tried to talk to her about her homework.
“You know what?” I told her. “I’m going to wait for you to ask for help if you need it. I’m working on being patient. It’s hard for me. But I’m going to try, okay? At the end of our time together, you can let me know how I did.”
For a moment, surprise registered on Marty’s face. Then she shrugged and hunched over her worksheet, shielding it from me.
Keira talked enough for both of them. She told me about her friends, her favorite teacher, her school’s awful lunches. I had to bring her focus back to her homework repeatedly, but her openness charmed me. Though Marty was silent on my other side, I sensed her listening to our conversation. After twenty minutes, she tapped my arm and asked me how to spell the worddaughter. I told her, and she returned to her work. I saw that her letters were small and neat. When another volunteer came to collect the girls for an art project in the studio, Marty stopped on her way out of the room. She turned to me with a very serious expression and said, “Ms. Shawe, you’re doing fine.”
Her words caused me to experience a rush of joy that I had not felt in years.
I signed up to volunteer three afternoons each week. I never missed a day; I wanted those students to know that they could depend on me. Sometimes I read to them, but more often I told them stories. I told them about children who turned into butterflies each time they entered a forest thick with fog. I told themabout the adventures of a family of whales traveling from Alaska to Baja. I told them the story of a boy who crawled deep into a cave and heard the voices of his ancestors. I told them about a mermaid who was so powerful that her songs caused the ocean to crash against the land and change its shape forever.
For all its flaws, what I remembered most from my childhood was the abundance of magic; it was a gift that I longed to share.
WHENIFIRSTleft Horseshoe Cliff, Rosalie Langford had given me a phone, and every so often she would call and invite me to lunch. Sometimes we ate at a restaurant and sometimes at her home, which I preferred because it allowed me to imagine, for a couple of hours, that I was a member of the family. It also meant that I would see Emma, who was just as sweet as she entered her teenage years as she had been at ten years old. Emma and I also swam together every few weeks at Baker Beach. Afterward we would wrap ourselves in huge towels and stare out at the sea. Neither of us liked to go too long without putting our feet in the sand.
These were my closest friends: a fourteen-year-old girl and a twenty-two-year-old college classmate and a woman in her fifties.
Rosalie frequently asked me about my work with Learning Together. One day, I walked into the center and learned from my boss that she had donated such a large sum to the organization that they would be able to double the number of children it served.
When I graduated from college, I was offered a full-time role at the center. Rosalie insisted on throwing a dinner party to celebrate. It would just be the family, she said, but if I wanted to invite a friend, I could. I invited Ronnie, who was curious to finally meet the famous Langfords, whom she enjoyed referring to as “the Benefactors” in an overarticulated English accent. She knew bits and pieces of how we had met—but not, of course, the entire story.
When we rang the doorbell at the Langfords’ home, a caterer greeted us with glasses of champagne and told us we were expected in the living room.
“Fancy,” Ronnie whispered, excited.
I was surprised to see Will Langford sitting in the living room alone. Rosaliehadsaid the family would attend, but I had not seen Will once in the four years that I’d been visiting Rosalie and Emma and Wayne, and it had not occurred to me that he might be there. He traveled frequently, Rosalie had told me, for business and for pleasure.He’s become something of anadventurer, she’d said, and the way she’d emphasized the word had let me know that she approved.
It was possible that he was even more handsome than I’d remembered. I felt myself blush deeply, and when I managed to greet him my voice sounded strange.
“It’s nice to see you, Will. This is my friend, Ronnie.”
“Hello,” Ronnie said. She turned to me with eyes that brimmed with delight and mouthed the wordshubba hubbain plain view of Will.
I shook my head sharply, but it was impossible not to laugh.
